Penny Lam: Int’l Documentary Film Festival curator | ‘We want to continue to develop this festival’

Penny Lam

Penny Lam is a documentary filmmaker and the curator of the Macau International Documentary Film Festival, the first of which was held last month, concluding on May 1.
The festival brought together 18 documentary films by directors from Asia, Europe and the U.S., including the renowned Portuguese director Pedro Costa, and the Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who is associated with the Iranian New Wave film movement.
Macau’s market for film festivals is still maturing, however interest in it is beginning to grow in the city. Several new festivals have been established in recent years promoting foreign and locally produced films, including the Macau International Film and Video Festival and the recently announced Macau International Film Festival.
Penny Lam sat down with the Times to discuss why he and his team decided to organize Macau’s first documentary film festival, and what they have in store for next year.

Macau Daily Times (MDT) – Can you explain your affinity for documentaries?
Penny Lam (PL) – Shooting documentaries is unique; it’s not like making other films. As a documentary filmmaker you can experience the same things as your subjects. For example, I made a documentary about Catholic priests and I went to live with them for a period [of time]. I would wake up early like they did, and eat with them and go to church, and so on. In a way I adopted their lifestyle for a while… and it can be very surreal. We only have one life, but through filmmaking you can experience more than one, and that is what interests me.

MDT – Why did you want to run the documentary festival?
PL – The main reason is that we don’t have festivals in Macau that focus on documentaries and, in some ways [there are negative] stereotypes in Macau. People think that documentaries are not ‘films’, but something else. They tend to think of documentaries as very political or very serious or boring, and not something that you can go to the cinema to enjoy. We want to introduce real documentaries as a film genre to Macau, so that people who normally [associate] them with television can have the chance to watch them as film.

MDT – Why did you choose the theme of “doMEmentary,” a fusion of “documentary” and personal perspective?
PL – Documentaries are often thought about as concerning society, but we want to introduce them in the opposite way: they can be very small, very personal.
In this way, people in Macau can feel engaged – especially as media is so close to everyone’s life today. The idea is essentially that, in documentary-
making, you can start from something very small.

MDT – What has the reception been like from Macau?
PL – Most of the comments
from the audience indicate that people enjoyed the documentaries. They said that they found the films very entertaining and very enjoyable. Sometimes when people buy tickets they might still think that the documentaries will require concentration and patience to enjoy. But often this is not the case. What surprised me actually, was that some films that were a disaster at the box office sold well in Macau. A few films – like “Taxi” – sold out, both screenings in fact.

MDT – Will you do this again next year and what are your early thoughts about it?
PL – Our team has discussed a bit about the next edition already and we want to continue to develop this festival, but that is going to take a few years. For the next few years we want to focus on those that are audience-friendly.
What I mean by that is [those that are] not too academic, or too serious, or too artistic. We want to show those with good production value to get the message out.

MDT – What do you make of the broader changes that the Macau film festival market has experienced recently?
PL – The festivals are helping to broaden the interest in Macau and have been attracting more professionals to Macau over the last 10 years. Macau audiences don’t care yet how famous the film or director is – for example if they have won awards – but I think that’s a good thing. For example, in Hong Kong if you show a film that was premiered at Cannes, it will attract a lot of attention. I think how you present a film in Macau is still very important. If you present it well, [local audiences] will give it a try. Daniel Beitler